Made to Order | Clive Thompson
http://www.slate.com/id/2105436/
“Dustin Smith loved DJing at his friends’ parties, but his MP3-filled computer just wasn’t rugged or portable enough to haul across town. When Smith found a vintage OshKosh makeup case, a light went off. After buying a bunch of electronics components and making a zillion trips t o the hardware store, he was done: Smith had crammed an entire computer inside the retro case. ‘There’s a real design aesthetic to it,’ he says, ‘but I also wanted something really functional.’ When I first saw Smith’s tricked-out machine, I immediately wanted one to call my own. The makeup-case computer is an example of a ‘casemod,’ a modification of an interesting shell—a coffee maker, a typewriter, a chrome box—so that a computer fits inside.”

A Digital Generation’s Analog Chic | Juliet Chung
http://tinyurl.com/6ss8e
“‘I wanted the biggest cellphone I could find,’ said Mr. Auh, a 27-year-old investment manager in Philadelphia. His winning bid of $25.95 bought a Motorola DynaTac, a 1980’s-era ‘brick’ cellphone that fits more comfortably in a backpack than in a suit pocket. […] While his attraction to digital relics may seem unusual, Mr. Auh is part of what appears to be a gr owing group of 20-somethings embracing yesterday’s designs. These fans of retro technology are using ingenuity to find or fashion the perfect cellphones, gaming systems and computer cases – in effect ushering back a time they experienced only barely, if at all. ”